"I followed the debate about a successor for the C/C++ combination as the primary language for developing the GNOME core desktop platform very closely last month. There has been discussion about a number of options. What I would like to do on this page is give an overview how a probably less well-known language might be a viable compromise as a C/C++ successor. This language is called Eiffel and exists for over a decade. Eiffel takes the principle of Object-Oriented programming to its extremes and, as a consequence, is a very easy to learn language."

I've often thought that C++ would be fine, as long as you limited yourself to a small, simple subset of the language.

The whole giant edifice that is C++ is pretty gruesome if you allow folks to use every darn feature of the language, but if you made a strict Gnome-C++ policy doc: here's the features we use, here's the ones we don't, here's the patterns we prefer, here's how we'll manage memory, etc... If you really trimmed C++ down to the basics, my guess is that it'd probably work well.